Seeing as the following every time creates huge numbers of eclipse threads which grind the system to a halt (even on clean reboot) and eventually kills X and hangs linux (!):

#!/bin/bashcd /apps/eclipseeclipse

and the eclipse executable only works if run from it's directory (sigh; just like DOS). I'd rather like to be able to run eclipse from anywhere on the machine. I'm sure everyone doesn't cd to the directory before running it, surely?

PS any advice on managing workspaces? I know that the eclipse authors are a bit behind on this new-fangled concept of actually having multiple workspaces (!), and only just added it, but I'm in the really depressing position of just having spent 20 minutes setting up things that any normal person might reasonably expect to be system-wide settings only to discover that instead they only apply to that workspace - and it's the wrong one anyway . I'm hoping I can just find the workspace files and copy one over the other (although thtat means I'll have to recreate every bloody project. Sob).

Unless there's some secret settings dialog I haven't found yet then it seems workspaces are next to useless - every time you want to make a system-wide change you have to manually switch to each worskapce (takes many many minutes because eclipse does a full quit-and-restart-the-application rather than do what other software has been doing for the last 15 years) and manually drill down through each dialog and change the setting in eahc and every damn workspace. Sob.

Eclipse: the 21st century IDE with the 1980's versions of "installation", "user-friendliness" and "configurationf"? Hmm.

PPS don't get me wrong - eclipse 3 *as an IDE* is so hot I need to run my hands under the cold tap . For the first time in my life I've seen a free IDE with a source-code formatter which can only be described as "as close to perfect as you'll ever get"...It's just that the install/config/docs are still as horrific as ever .

EDIT: pity they couldnt get the same person to do the keyboard assignment GUI. Worst I've ever seen in 10+ years of using IDE's. Took me literally 3 minutes to change a single keybinding becuase of the mind-numbingly stupid interface. Sigh.

EDIT2: eventually, too late, I discovered there is an "export settings" button; you have to export from one workspace, and import to the other. Makes sense, if you already knew that.

But there is only one project/workspace you could possibly dream of using ---- that of extending the IDE itself. At least that is my theory as to why NetBeans (prior to 4) has been awkward to use on multiple workspaces/projects especially if you use more than one machine and want to synchronize your settings (or god forbid work with someone else).I currently use Intellij IDEA. It seems that sometimes you have to pay for something that is commercially useful.

I know that the eclipse authors are a bit behind on this new-fangled concept of actually having multiple workspaces (!), and only just added it,

No idea what you're getting at here. I've been using multiple workspaces with Eclipse for at least a year and a half now.

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It's just that the install/config/docs are still as horrific as ever .

I've never had a problem with them. The IDE is incredibly intuitive to use, and things are usually sensibly named. Installation is painless, configuration is just a matter of wading through a plethora of dialogues changing the (rather sensible) defaults. If you need to refer to the docs, you'll find a huge amount of info on the website.

The website is, of course, a different matter. Bloody awful. I suggest searching Google for "site:eclipse.org <query>" instead of drilling down their silly page structure to find the info you need.

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EDIT: pity they couldnt get the same person to do the keyboard assignment GUI. Worst I've ever seen in 10+ years of using IDE's. Took me literally 3 minutes to change a single keybinding becuase of the mind-numbingly stupid interface. Sigh.

That long? Wow, must have been an off-day for you. Select the category, select the item. Click the current binding and hit remove, focus the new binding box and press the key you want to bind. If it tells you that keypress is already bound, hit backspace and try something else. Save, rinse and repeat.

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EDIT2: eventually, too late, I discovered there is an "export settings" button; you have to export from one workspace, and import to the other. Makes sense, if you already knew that.

Ah-ha! You found the "Export..." button carefully hidden on every single Preferences dialogue, right next to the "Import..." button. They really should make these things harder to find.

OT, but I started it and no-one's answered my original post, so I might as well have a go at replying...

The following is not written as a rant, merely as a recounting of my experiences with this, because I seem to be having very different experiences to you. I'm still new to eclipse, so perhaps there's some obvious problem here that's making life hard for me? (your comment on the help was interesting, perhaps that's why I'm finding it so hard - see below?)

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No idea what you're getting at here. I've been using multiple workspaces with Eclipse for at least a year and a half now.

According to the release notes, they were only properly added in version 3. Version 3 was only released a few months ago. Before that, they required manual command-line alteration on each launch. In a world where other IDE's have supported instantaneous workspace switching for a decade or more, that looks to me like an "afterthought"; it's like making a window dialog without a cancel button: perhaps in 1990 few expectations for dialog boxes had yet been established, and no-one would be surprised, but people *expect* these things in 2004.

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I've never had a problem with them. The IDE is incredibly intuitive to use, and things are usually sensibly named.

No problems with the IDE *once it's running*. My issues are with installing it and configuring it. There is a clear multiple-personality-disorder going on here: at runtime it is - as you say - very intuitive; but pre-install (i.e the website, as you point out, but also the download page etc - whihc has no release notes, no install guide, etc), and install are generally appalling, and a lot of parts of config are bad too (although, as noted, there are some diamonds in the rough).

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Installation is painless,

Um. Go to the download page. It tries to get you to use a mirror. Go to the mirror. You are presented with ... some random (non-standard names) directories and no help. Drill down a bit, eventually (if you're lucky and picked the "right" directories) you find a massive directory with something like 50 (more?) alternative downloads all claiming to be installable versions of eclipse. For linux, you have GTK or Motif, SDK or not, JDT or not, and probably more (although I gave up at that point and just went to debian, looked for the filesizes of what debian installs when you install "eclipse" and took the files with those filesizes give or take 5%).

This is spectacularly crap. It just looks like they don't WANT you to use eclipse. It reminds me of the worst of the hardcore anti-social political open-sourcers that give their colleagues a bad name by openly saying things like "if you need to ask idiot questions you are not skilled enough / don't deserve to use the software so I won't help you". I simply cannot imagine why the eclipse project presents a portion of it's public face in a way that is so redolent of that attitude.

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configuration is just a matter of wading through a plethora of dialogues changing the (rather sensible) defaults. If you need to refer to the docs, you'll find a huge amount of info on the website.

Help kept either doing nothing or else stealing a web browser and displaying an error page. Was it connecting to the eclipse website? I have no idea. No other internet problems here. Crap. Crap crap crap.

Config uses the SWT. Which is crap - most of the help screens have NO SCROLLBARS which means there are some options that are almost impossible for me to change because they have been laid out off the edge of the canvas and clipped away. This is on a 1400x1050 screen - not small! - with fonts scaled as if it were approx 1024x768 or perhaps closer to 800x600.

In contrast, only one dialog in the GUI has ever had this problem (the create-new-class for JUnit has too many tickbox options that disappear off the bottom).

I used to work at IBM in development, and I filed bugs against a project I was on because one of the prima-donna (arsehole) programmers had made the GUI entirely with non-resizable components and hadn't bothered anywhere to put in scrollbars unless they were necessary on HIS personal workstation. At one point he came storming into my office personally (this only ever happened once in my time there - it was pretty rare) and had a go at me for filing bugs on the fact that the entire software was unusable on 800x600 monitors. This was last century, when 800x600 was even more common than today, and the software was major server software where the admin was often done on low-spec machines rather than high-spec PC's.

It was quite a common problem, and it seems that it has persisted into eclipse: arrogant programmers with massive monitors who have a bizarre belief that normal people don't deserve to use their software and should be less skinflint and buy larger monitors.

Sorry. That turned into a rant. But it does really piss me off that a problem that was solved many years ago still comes back to haunt us. Even more so that SWT is supposed to be better than Sun GUI's and yet repeatedly produces far worse GUI's. .

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That long? Wow, must have been an off-day for you.

I kept doing what seemed normal from all other apps I use and it kept merely telling me what my new keycombo was *already* bound to, deselecting the action (so I had to go and find the damn thing again). Clicking "remove" on the current binding made a blue triangle appear next to the name, and nothing else. WTF! This is non-standard crap; if you are bold (or arrogant) enough to defy common standards, you *have* to make an effortlessly idiot-proof GUI. Eclipse configuration throws several common standards out the window and then uses a complex non-intuitive GUI with no help.

FYI I had one hour previously managed to reassign a shortcut in just 10 seconds or so. But I kept trying to repeat my previous actions without success. God only knows what minor subtle mistake I was making. Sob.

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If it tells you that keypress is already bound, hit backspace and try something else. Save, rinse and repeat.

See? that's not standard. Vast majority of software if you "hit backspace" it will bind backspace. The standard approach is you click, then you press any set of keys, which are instantly bound, and then you click OK. Eclipse throws away the standard for no apparent benefit.

From a usability perspective, I don't give a **** what action the key is already bound to, except perhaps to popup a dialog and say "would you like to bind that thing to something else? Or simply unbind it entirely? Or have one keypress bound to two things?" (If I understand correctly, eclipse bindings are context-sensitive, so it can do the simultaneous binding trick?)

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Ah-ha! You found the "Export..." button carefully hidden on every single Preferences dialogue, right next to the "Import..." button. They really should make these things harder to find.

It's a grey button. Next to 4, 5, sometimes more grey buttons. It's not obvious, it's not set apart from the rest, and it's not on every dialog (I agree it's on most, but I think it isn't on all of them - for instance, one of the most obvious places of all, IIRC it's not on the code-formatting editor. Or ... maybe it is, but it gets cut off my screen because of their hardcoded no-scrollbars?).

The standard approach is to have multi-level config. You have "global" settings and you have "local" settings and the config is sensibly split by an intelligent person between those things. Again, this is a standard - it's what people are used to. Eclipse doesn't do this at all. Why, then, would it be "obvious" that you need to look for an export button (which most software *doesn't need* to solve this problem, and hence doesn't use)? There was nothing in eclipse anywhere to suggest that it was even possible to export sub-sections of config. Of course, eventually with random exploration I wondered what that button did, and discovered that eclipse has this feature.

As I said ... easy to use once you know that it's there, but until you do there's nothing to make you think it is there, so you don't look for it.

According to the release notes, they were only properly added in version 3.

Yeah and you still need to restart the IDE to switch as far as I can tell.

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Um. Go to the download page. It tries to get you to use a mirror. Go to the mirror. You are presented with ... some random (non-standard names) directories and no help. Drill down a bit, eventually (if you're lucky and picked the "right" directories) you find a massive directory with something like 50 (more?) alternative downloads all claiming to be installable versions of eclipse.

I don't find this nearly as difficult as you do... not sure why.. you are really making it much harder than it actually is. I figure hitting download, choosing a mirror, and selecting the 'latest release' to be very straight forward. The mistake is scrolling down to find all those other components (e.g. JDT) that nobody cares about. But if you read the descriptions I do think there is one place that tells you something along the lines of - "if you want to use the Eclipse IDE get this", or maybe it is the other things that say "don't get this if you want the IDE..get XXX instead."

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It was quite a common problem, and it seems that it has persisted into eclipse: arrogant programmers with massive monitors who have a bizarre belief that normal people don't deserve to use their software and should be less skinflint and buy larger monitors.

But it's true. I suppose it should run smoothly on a 25Mhz intel 286 as well ?

The funny thing is that the source formatter (which you like) is the one thing that was really broken for the longest time. I haven't tried it recently because it just didn't work on all the milestone releases.

Seeing as the following every time creates huge numbers of eclipse threads which grind the system to a halt (even on clean reboot) and eventually kills X and hangs linux (!):

#!/bin/bashcd /apps/eclipseeclipse

and the eclipse executable only works if run from it's directory (sigh; just like DOS). I'd rather like to be able to run eclipse from anywhere on the machine. I'm sure everyone doesn't cd to the directory before running it, surely?

Maybe you called the script above "eclipse" and it is in your $PATH. This would result in the script calling itself over and over again (it doesn't actually hang X or Linux, if you stop it with "Strg+C" and wait some seconds). Replace "eclipse" by "./eclipse".

Maybe you called the script above "eclipse" and it is in your $PATH. This would result in the script calling itself over and over again (it doesn't actually hang X or Linux, if you stop it with "Strg+C" and wait some seconds). Replace "eclipse" by "./eclipse".

that may well be right, in which case im an idiot. Thnks for the idea...

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